Schmidt Number: S-2246

On-line since: 17th September, 2005

It affords me great satisfaction to be able to speak
somewhat at length for the third time to our friends here in Norway,
and I should like briefly to reply, in answer to our dear friend Mr.
Eriksen, that the words of hearty greeting which he has just spoken
are responded to by me in an equally deep and heartfelt manner.

I hope that this course of lectures, which I am about to
begin, may add somewhat to the knowledge of what we may call the
entire picture of our view of the world. I should like to call your
attention to the fact that this particular course of lectures must
necessarily contain something that is as yet rather remote from
modern human thinking, but which nevertheless belongs to the most
profound truths of spiritual science. I therefore request those of
our esteemed friends who have occupied themselves less with the more
far-reaching questions of Anthroposophy, to take into consideration
that we should not make progress in our work, if we did not from time
to time take a mighty leap, make a vigorous move forward into regions
of spiritual knowledge that are really somewhat remote from modern
human thought, feeling and perception.

From this point of view it will sometimes be necessary
to meet our explanations with a certain amount of good-will; for were
I to bring forward all that might be adduced in the way of evidence
and proof of what will be said here in the next few days, it would
require a much longer time. We should not advance in our knowledge of
this particular subject, if we were not to make some little appeal to
your goodwill and sympathetic spiritual understanding. For indeed the
province which we touch upon here, is one which up to our own times
has been more or less avoided by occultists, mystics and
theosophists, for the reason, that a higher degree of open-mindedness
is necessary, in order to accept the things that are to be said,
without a certain degree of opposition that might now and then be
felt.

Perhaps you will better understand what we mean if you
remember, that at a certain stage of mystic or occult development one
is called a ‘homeless man.’ This designation is a
technical one, and if we wish to characterize without further ado —
as we are not now speaking about the path of knowledge — what
is to be understood by the term ‘homeless man,’ we may
briefly say, that a man is called ‘homeless’ when, in his
knowledge and grasp of the great laws of humanity, he cannot be
influenced by all that usually arises in a person through living in
his native country. A ‘homeless man’, we might also say,
is one who is able to identify himself with the great mission of
humanity as a whole, without the various shades of the particular
feelings belonging to this or the other home-land playing any part.
This will show you that a certain degree of maturity in mystical or
occult development is necessary, in order to have a liberal point of
view regarding something which we otherwise rightly consider great,
which, in contradistinction to individual human life, we describe as
the Mission of the several Folk-spirits, as that which brings, out of
the foundations of a people, out of the spirit of the various
peoples, the separate concrete contributions to the collective
mission of humanity.

We shall therefore describe what we may call the
greatness of that from which the ‘homeless man’ must in a
certain respect free himself. Now the ‘homeless’ men of
all times, from primeval ages down to our own day, have always known,
that if they were to characterize in all its fullness that which is
described as the character of homelessness, they would meet with
very, very little understanding. In the first place a certain
prejudice would be brought against these homeless men, which would be
voiced in the reproach: ‘You have lost all connection with the
nation from which you have sprung; you have no understanding for that
which is usually most dear to a man’. This, however, is not
really the case.

Homelessness is in reality — or at least it may be
so — a détour or roundabout way, so that, after this sanctuary
of homelessness has been attained, the way may be found back to the
folk, in order to be in harmony with what is permanent in the
evolution of mankind. Although it is necessary to begin by drawing
attention to this, on the other hand it is also not without reason,
that just as the present time, that which we call the Mission of the
several Folk-souls of humanity, should for once be spoken of quite
impartially. Just as it was right that, to a certain extent, silence
should be maintained regarding their mission until the present time,
there are good reasons why one should now begin to speak of this
mission. It is especially important, because the fate of humanity in
the near future will bring men together much more than has hitherto
been the case, to fulfill a common mission for humanity. But the
individuals belonging to the several peoples will only be able to
bring their free, concrete contributions to this joint mission, if
they have, first of all, an understanding of the folk to which they
belong, an understanding of what we might call ‘The
Self-knowledge of the Folk.’ In ancient Greece, in the
Apollonic Mysteries the sentence ‘Know thyself’ played a
great rôle; in a not far-distant future this sentence will be
addressed to the Folk-souls; ‘Know yourselves as Folk-souls’.
This saying will have a certain significance for the future work of
mankind.

Now in our age it will be peculiarly difficult to
recognize beings, who to external sensible perception and knowledge
do not exist, so to speak. It may perhaps not be so difficult for our
present time to acknowledge that a man, as he stands before us in the
world, possesses certain members, certain portions of his being,
which are super-sensible, invisible. The modern materialistic mind of
man may perhaps admit more easily the view, that beings, who at all
events as regards their external side can be seen physically, such as
human beings, may also have a super-sensible invisible part. But it
must appear very unreasonable to our age, to be told about beings,
who to the ordinary view, are not there at all. For what after all is
it that is still referred to here and there as the soul or spirit of
a nation? At most it is something that passes as an attribute, a
common attribute pertaining to so and so many hundred people, or
millions of people, who are crowded together in a certain country.
That besides these millions of people who are crowded together in
this land, something real lives there as well, which would coincide
with the conception of the Folk-spirit, — and which underlies
this conception, — is difficult to make clear to the man of our
present day. If one were to ask, — let us now say, in order to
take something neutral — what does modern man understand by the
Swiss nation-spirit? He would describe in abstract expressions a few
attributes possessed by the people who inhabit the Swiss portion of
the Alps and Jura, and it would be quite clear to him, that this does
not correspond to anything that might be recognized with eyes or
other organs of perception. The first thing to be done, must be
openly and honestly to form the thought, that there are beings who do
not directly manifest themselves to the senses, and do not present
themselves at all to the ordinary material capacities of perception;
that there are, so to speak amongst the beings perceptible to the
senses, other beings invisibly at work, who work into the visible
beings, just as the human being works into the hands or fingers, and
that we may therefore speak of a Swiss Folk-spirit as we do of the
spirit of a man, and that we can just as clearly distinguish the
spirit of a man from what we see before us in his ten fingers, as we
can distinguish the Swiss Folk-spirit from the millions of people
living in the mountains of Switzerland. It is something quite
different, a being, in fact, just as man himself is a being; only man
is distinguished from a Folk-spirit by the fact that he presents to
us a sensibly perceptible outer side. A human being presents himself
to the external organs of perception; a Folk-spirit does not present
himself in an external form that can be perceived or felt by the
outer senses, but is nevertheless an absolutely real being.

Today we shall endeavor to form a sort of conception of
a real being such as this. How do we proceed in spiritual science if
we wish to form an idea of a real being? A characteristic example of
how we do this is to be obtained by glancing in the first place at
the being of man. If we wish to describe man anthroposophically, we
distinguish in him the physical body, the etheric or life-body, the
astral or sentient body, and that which we look upon as the highest
member of the human being, the ‘ I ’. We know
therefore that in what we call physical body, etheric body, astral
body and ‘ I ’, we have before us so to speak
the man of the present day. But you know also that we look forward to
an evolution of mankind in the future, and that the ‘ I ’
works upon the three lower members of the human being, so that it
spiritualizes them, transforming them from the present lower into the
future higher forms. The ‘ I ’ will remodel and
transform the astral, so that it will become something different from
what it is to-day. The astral body will then represent what you know
by the name of Spirit-self or Manas. In the same way a still higher
work of the ‘ I ’ will be accomplished upon the
etheric or life-body, by transforming it and remodeling it into what
we call Life-spirit or Budhi; and finally, the highest work of man
which we can imagine at present, is that man will spiritualize that
member of his being which offers the greatest resistance, the
physical body; he will transform it and change it into the spiritual.
That will be the highest member of the human being, when the ‘ I ’
has re-shaped what at present is the physical body; that which to-day
seems grossest and most material, will, when transformed by the
‘ I ’, become the Spirit-man or Atma. Thus we
see three members of the human nature which have developed in the
past, one in which we now live, and three others, out of which, in
the future, the ‘ I ’ will make something new.

We know too, that between the work done in the past and
that which will be done in the future to form the three higher
members, there lies something else. We know that we must think of the
‘ I ’ itself as inwardly organized. It works
upon a sort of intermediate being. Therefore we say, that between the
astral body, such as man has it from the past, and the Spirit-self or
Manas, which will develop in man out of this astral body in the
distant future, there are the three preparatory members: the
Sentient-soul, the lowest member in which the ‘ I ’
has worked, the Intellectual-soul or Mind-soul, and the
Spiritual-soul; so that we may say to-day: of that which we are
developing as Spirit-self or Manas very little can be found in man
to-day — at most only a beginning.

On the other hand man has prepared himself for this
future work, by having in a certain way, to a certain extent, learnt
to master his three lower members. He has prepared himself by having
learnt to master the sentient body or astral body, by pressing into
it with his ‘ I ’ and forming within it the
sentient-soul.

Just as the sentient-soul stands in a certain
relationship to the sentient body, so does the intellectual-soul or
mind-soul to the etheric or life-body, so that the intellectual-soul
or mind-soul is a feeble prototype of what the Life-spirit or Budhi
will be — a feeble prototype it is true, but nevertheless a
prototype; and that which is to be found in the spiritual-soul is in
a certain way worked into the physical body by the ‘ I ’;
therefore that is a feeble prototype of what will some day be
Spirit-man or Atma. We may also say that we can recognize in man
to-day — not taking into consideration the insignificant
portion which he has already developed out of his astral body as the
beginning of Spirit-self or Manas, — four different members. We
can distinguish:

1. the Physical body,
2. the Etheric body,
3. the Astral body,
4. the ‘ I ’, which works within them,

and further, as a fore-shining of the higher members,

the Sentient-soul,
the Intellectual-soul,
the Spiritual-soul.

Here we have man as a being such as he presents himself
to us today; here we comprehend man, so to speak, at the present
moment of his evolution. We can see the ‘ I ’
working out the higher members, after the sentient-soul, the
intellectual and spiritual souls have served as a preparation. We see
the ‘ I ’ working with the forces of the
sentient, the intellectual and spiritual souls, upon the astral body,
upon the beginnings of the Spirit-self. At the present time we see
man at this stage of his work.

Those of you — and that will be most of you —
who have studied what we call the researches into the Akashic
Records, the evolution of man in the primeval past and the outlook
into the distant future, will know that man, such as I have just
sketchily described him, has evolved; that we can look back into a
distant past; that man has required long epochs of evolution in order
to form the first foundations of his physical body, then those of his
etheric body, and finally, to form those of his astral body and then
to develop these three members further. For all this, man has
required long periods of time. You may also know that man did not go
through the earlier evolution of his being, for instance, the
evolution of his astral body, in the same condition of the earth in
which the earth is now, but that he developed his astral body in an
earlier existence of the earth, in the Moon-existence. Just as we
perceive our present life to be the result of earlier earth lives, of
earlier incarnations, so do we look too, upon earlier incarnations of
our earth. What we call the sentient-soul and the intellectual-soul,
or mind-soul, were first formed in our present earth-existence. The
astral body was implanted during the Moon-existence, and in a still
earlier existence of our earth, in the old Sun-condition, the etheric
body was implanted, and finally the physical body during the Saturn
condition. So that we look back to three incarnations of our earth,
and in each of these we see one of the members which man bears within
him to-day, implanted first as a germ and then perfected further.

There is still something else to note, in speaking of
the Saturn, Sun and Moon conditions. Just as we human beings on the
earth are passing through the condition which we call the
self-conscious human condition, so during the earlier conditions of
our earth evolution, during the old Moon, Sun and Saturn conditions,
other beings went through the stage we are now going through upon the
earth. It is not of much importance whether we use the terminology of
the East or that which is more customary in the West, to describe
these beings. Those beings who, during the Moon-state of our earth,
were at the stage which man is now passing through, and who are the
next higher beings above ourselves, we call in the terminology of
Christian esotericism, Angeloi or Angels. These are one stage higher
than man, because they completed their human stage one epoch earlier,
so that therefore these beings during the old Moon state were what we
now are. But they were not human in the sense that they went about on
the Moon as we do now upon earth. They were beings at the human
stage, but they did not dwell in flesh as man does now. It was only
that their stage of evolution corresponded to the human stage which
man is going through to-day. In the same way we find beings of a
still higher order, who went through their human evolution on the old
Sun. They are the Archangels. These are beings who are two degrees
higher than man, who went through their human stage two epochs
earlier. If we go still further, back to the first incarnation of our
earth-existence, back to the Saturn stage, we find that those beings
went through their human stage there whom we designate as Spirits of
Personality, Archai, or First Beginnings. So that, if we begin with
these beings, who were men in the primeval past, during the old
Saturn state, and if we then follow the incarnations of the earth
down to our own period, we have the stages of evolution of various
beings, down to ourselves. Therefore we can say: The First
Beginnings, the Archai, were men on old Saturn; Archangels, or
Arch-Angeloi, were men on the old Sun; Angels or Angeloi were men on
the old Moon; men are men on our earth.

Now, as we know that we continue our evolution into the
future, and that we further develop our lower members, which to-day
are our astral body, our etheric or life-body and our physical body,
we must surely inquire: Is it not just as natural that the beings who
formerly passed through the human stage, should now be already at the
stage at which they are transforming their astral body into
Spirit-Self or Manas? Just as we during the next incarnation of the
earth, during the Jupiter state, shall finish the transforming of our
astral body into the Spirit-self or Manas, so have the Angels, those
beings who were men in the Moon-period, finished the transforming of
their astral bodies into Spirit-self or Manas, or they will finish it
during our earth-stage, — a process we shall have to go through
only during the next incarnation of the earth. If we look still
further back, to the beings who were men during the old
Sun-existence, we may say, that they have already, during the
Moon-state, gone through what we shall have to do only in the next
incarnation of the earth. They are doing the work which man will do
with his ‘ I ’, [when] he transforms his etheric or
life-body into Life-spirit or Budhi. Therefore in these Archangeloi,
in these Archangels we have beings who are two stages above us, they
are at the stage which we shall some day reach when we, from within
our ‘ I ’, shall transform the life-body into
Life-spirit or Budhi. When we look up to these beings we behold them
in such a way that we say: we see in them beings who are two stages
above us, beings, in whom we see in advance, as it were, what we
ourselves will experience in the future, we look up to them as beings
who are now working upon their etheric or life-body and are
transforming it into Life-spirit or Budhi. In just the same way we
look up to yet higher beings, to the Spirits of Personality. They are
at a still higher stage than the Archangels, at a stage which man
will reach in a still more distant future, when he will be able to
transform his physical body into Atma or Spirit-man.

As truly as man is at the present stage of his
existence, so truly are these corresponding beings at the stages of
their existence which have just been described; so truly are they
above us, so truly are they realities. Now this reality of theirs is
not far away from our earth-existence, but rather works in it and
plays apart in our human existence. We must now inquire how do these
beings who are above man work into our human existence? If we wish to
comprehend how they act upon us, we must bear in mind, that such
beings when at work, present a different spiritual aspect, so to
speak, from what those beings do whom to-day we call men. There is
indeed a considerable difference between these beings who are above
man and those beings who are now only at the human stage. However
strange what we are about to say may sound, it will be made quite
clear to you in the following lectures. True spiritual research shows
that man, such as he is to-day, is to some extent at a middle stage
of his existence. His ‘ I ’ will not always
work upon his lower members in the way it now does, the whole human
being is at the present time inwardly connected together, and forms
one uninterrupted whole, as it were. In the future evolution of
mankind this may become different, and it will become essentially
different. When man shall have advanced so far as to be able with
complete consciousness to work on his astral body, and by means of
his ‘ I ’ transform that astral body into
Spirit-self or Manas, he will be in a similar condition but with full
consciousness, to the present unconscious or subconscious condition
of man during sleep.

Just picture to yourselves the sleep condition of man.
In sleep man emerges, as regards his astral body and ‘ I ’,
out of his physical body and etheric body, he leaves the latter lying
on the bed and floats as it were outside them. Now imagine a man in
this condition in whom the consciousness awakes: ‘I am an
“ I ”’ — that it awakes in this
spirit-body, just as it is awake in the everyday state of
consciousness. What a remarkable picture would man then present to
himself. In one place he would feel, ‘Here am I,’ and
perhaps there down below, far removed from the first place, ‘There
are my physical and etheric bodies, they are in that place and they
belong to me, but I with my other members am hovering outside and
above them.’ If at the present day a man becomes conscious in
his astral body, outside his physical and etheric bodies, it is then
certain, however highly evolved he may be on the earth, that he can
do nothing beyond moving freely about here and there in his astral
body and being active here and there in the world independently of
his physical body, but he cannot as yet do this with his physical and
etheric bodies. In a distant future, however, one will be able from
outside to guide them, for instance, from a place in the north of
Europe to another place and order them to go on further, and then be
able from outside to direct their movements. That is not yet possible
to-day. Man will, however, be able to do this when he has evolved
himself beyond the stage of the earth-evolution on to that of
Jupiter, the following stage of evolution of our earth planet, and
the following stage of evolution of man. We shall then feel that we
can, as it were, direct ourselves from without. That is the essential
thing, and that leads to a division of what we have to-day called the
human being. Material consciousness can certainly not make much of
this. It cannot follow what in a certain respect is already actually
working in the external world in a similar way to what in the future
will be the case with the human being.

Such phenomena are already here. Man could perceive them
if he were to pay attention. He would see that there are certain
beings, for instance, who have developed themselves in this way too
soon. Just as man, if he waits for the proper moment, will reach the
Jupiter-state at the right time, so that he will then be able to
direct his physical and etheric bodies, so there are beings, who have
developed themselves in a certain respect prematurely, without
waiting for the proper time. Such prematurely developed beings we
possess in the birds, and especially in those which migrate every
year. It is the so-called group-soul which is connected with the
etheric body of each single bird. Just as the group-soul directs the
regular migrations of the birds over the earth, so will man after he
has developed Spirit-self or Manas command what we call the physical
and etheric bodies; he will direct them and set them in motion. He
will do this in a still higher sense from without, when he has
evolved so far, that in addition he is also working at the
transformation of his etheric or life-body.

There are beings who can already do this to-day. These
are the Archangels or Archangeloi. They are beings who can already do
what man will be able to do some day, beings who can accomplish what
we call ‘directing one's etheric and physical bodies from
outside’; but besides this they are also able to work upon
their own etheric body.

Try to form an idea of beings, working around our earth,
who, as to their ‘ I ’, are contained in the
spiritual atmosphere of our earth, who from this ‘ I ’
of theirs have already transformed their astral body, so that they
possess a completely developed Spirit-self or Manas, but who now work
with this fully developed Spirit-self or Manas upon our earth and
work in upon man, by transforming our etheric or life-body; beings at
the stage at which they are transforming the etheric or life-body
into Budhi or Life-spirit. If you think of such beings, who belong to
the spiritual Hierarchy, whom we call Archangels, you then have an
idea of what are called Nation-spirits, the directing Folk-spirits of
the earth. The Folk-spirits belong to the rank of the Archangels or
Archangeloi. We shall see how they on their part direct the etheric
or life-body, and how they thereby work in upon man and draw him into
their own activity. If we contemplate the various peoples on the
earth and draw special attention to some of them, then, in the
characteristics and qualities peculiar to these peoples, we see a
reflection of what we may consider as the mission of these peoples.

When we recognize the mission of these beings, who are
the inspirers of the various peoples, we can then say what a nation
really is: it is a group of persons belonging together, guided by one
of the Archangels. The individual members of a nation receive what
they as members of that nation are to do and what they are to
accomplish, by inspiration from such a source. Hence if we can
imagine that these Folk-spirits are individually different, as are
the human beings on our earth, we shall find it comprehensible that
the several different groups of people are the individual missions of
these Archangels. If we can make a clear mental picture of how in the
history of the world peoples work side by side, and how nation
succeeds nation, we can then, at all events in an abstract form (and
this form will become more and more concrete in the following
lectures) form an idea of how all this is inspired by these spiritual
Beings.

It will also be observed that in addition to this
activity of people after people something else takes place in human
evolution. In the period of time which we reckon as beginning after
the great Atlantean Catastrophe — which so completely altered
the face of the earth that the continent which lay between present
Africa, America and Europe was submerged — you can distinguish
the periods influenced by the great peoples from whom the
post-Atlantean civilizations came forth: the old Indian, the Persian,
the Chaldæan-Egyptian, the Græco-Latin and our present-day
civilization, which later on will pass over into the sixth age of
civilization. We also notice that various inspirers of the peoples
have been at work in those civilizations, working successively. We
know that the Chaldæan-Egyptian civilization continued long after the
Greek civilization had begun, and this in its turn continued when the
Roman had already begun. Thus we can observe the peoples side by side
as well as following one after another.

But in everything which evolves in and with the peoples
there is something else that evolves also. Human evolution
progresses. Whether we consider one civilization higher than another
is of no consequence. For instance, a person may say, ‘I
like the Indian culture best,’ that may be his personal
opinion. But one who is not swayed by personal opinion will say, ‘Our
valuation of things is a matter of indifference; the necessary course
of events leads humanity forward, although this might later be
considered as a decline. Necessity leads humanity forward. When we
compare the various periods, five thousand years before Christ, three
thousand years before Christ, and one thousand years after Christ, we
find something more which extends beyond the Folk-spirits, something
in which the several Folkspirits take a part. You may observe this in
our present time. How is it that in this room so many persons are
able to sit together, who come here from many different countries,
and understand each other or try to understand each other as regards
the most important thing which has brought them together here? The
different persons come from the domains of many different
Folk-spirits, and yet there is something in which they understand one
another. In a similar way the various peoples have understood one
another in various ages, because in every age there is something that
extends beyond the Folk-soul, which can bring the various Folk-souls
together, something which is understood everywhere to a greater or
less extent. It is what is called the ‘Zeitgeist’ or
‘Time Spirit’ or ‘Spirit of the Age’ —
although this word is not very suitable. The Time-Spirit in the Greek
age was not the same Spirit as in our own age. Those who grasp the
Spirit in our time, are driven to Spiritual Science. This is what
extends over the various Folk-souls out of the Spirit of the Age. At
the time when Christ Jesus appeared upon earth, His forerunner, John
the Baptist, indicated the Spirit we may describe as Zeitgeist in the
words, ‘Change your attitude towards life, for the kingdom of
heaven is at hand.’

Thus for every epoch we can find the ‘Spirit of
the Age’, and that is something which intertwines itself into
the activity of the Folk-spirits, into that which we have described
as the activity of the Archangeloi. To the materialistic man of
to-day, the Spirit of the Age is something quite abstract, without
any reality; it would be still more difficult for him to see a real
being in the Spirit of the Age. Nevertheless behind the word
Zeitgeist, or ‘Spirit of the Age’, there is concealed a
real being, and indeed none other than one three stages above the
stage of humanity. The Beings concealed behind this word are those
who went through their human stage on the old Saturn, at the earliest
epoch of the earth's evolution, and who at the present day are
working at the transformation of the earth from its spiritual
atmosphere, and in so doing are going through the last stage of the
transforming of their physical body into Spirit-man or Atma. We are
here dealing with exalted Beings, the contemplation of whose
attributes could well make man dizzy. They are the Beings who may be
described as the actual inspirers — or we should here say, if
we wish to use the technical expressions of occultism — the
‘intuitors’ of the Spirit or Spirits of the Age. They
work in such a way that they relieve one another in turn and extend
the hand to one another as it were. From epoch to epoch they pass on
their task to the next one. The Spirit of the Age who worked during
the Greek age, handed on his mission to the one who came after him.
There are, as we have seen, a number of such Spirits of the Age, of
such Spirits of Personality who work as Spirits of the Age. These
Spirits of Personality, the Intuitors of the spirit of the age, are
higher in rank than the Folk-spirits. In every epoch, one of these is
especially at work and gives the general signature to that epoch, he
gives his commissions to the Folk-spirits, so that the collective
spirit of the age is specialized, individualized by the Folk-spirits.
Then he is relieved in the following epoch by another Spirit of the
Age, or Spirit of Personality, or Archai.

When a certain number of ages have passed away, then a
Spirit of the Age has gone through a further evolution. We must think
of it thus: when we, in our age, die, and have gone through our
evolution here, our personality passes the result of this earthly
life on to the next one. This is also the case with the Spirits of
the Age. In each age we have one such Spirit of the Age; then at the
end of the age he passes on his office to his successor, who again
passes it on to the following one, and so on. The foregoing ones are
in the meanwhile going through their own evolution, and then that one
who has been longest absent, takes his turn again; so that, in a
later age, while the others are then proceeding with their own
evolution, the same one returns again as Spirit of the Age and gives
to the progressed humanity, by means of intuition, that which he
himself has in the meanwhile acquired for his higher mission. We look
up to these Spirits of Personality, to these Beings who may be called
by the otherwise meaningless name of Spirit of the Age, and may say:
‘We human beings go from incarnation to incarnation, but we
very well know, that while we are ourselves passing on from epoch to
epoch, that when we look into the future, we see ever different
Spirits of the Age, regulating the occurrences of our earth.’

But our present Spirit of the Age will return too, we
shall meet him again. On account of this attribute of these Spirits
of Personality, of their describing cycles, as it were, and returning
again to their starting-point, and of working in cycles, they are
also called Spirits of Cyclic Periods. We shall give further reasons
to justify this expression. These higher spiritual Beings who give
their orders to the Folk-spirits, are also called Spirits of Cyclic
Periods. We refer to those cyclic periods which man himself has to go
through, when age after age he returns in a certain way to earlier
conditions and repeats them in a higher form. Now you may be struck
by this repetition of the characteristics of earlier forms. If you
examine carefully into the stages of the evolution of man on the
earth according to spiritual science, you will find these repetitions
of occurrences in many different forms. Thus there is a repetition in
the fact that there are, so to speak, seven consecutive epochs
following after the Atlantean Catastrophe; these we call the
post-Atlantean stages of civilization. The Græco-Latin stage or age
of civilization forms the turning-point in our cycle and therefore it
is not repeated. After this comes the repetition of the
Egyptian-Chaldæan epoch, which is taking place in our own time. After
this will follow another epoch, which will be a repetition of the
Persian epoch, although in a somewhat different form; and then the
seventh epoch will come, which will be a repetition of the primeval
Indian civilization, the epoch of the Holy Rishis; so that in that
age certain things of which the foundations were laid in ancient
India will re-appear in a different form. The guidance of these
occurrences devolves upon the Spirits of the Age.

Now in order that, divided among the different peoples
on the earth, that which progresses from age to age should be
actualized, in order that many different forms should be developed in
this or the other land, growing out of this or that body of people
speaking the same language, out of this or that language of form, in
order that architecture, art and science may arise and assume their
metamorphoses and receive all that the Spirit of the Age could pour
into humanity, — for this we require the Folk-spirits, who, in
the hierarchy of the higher beings, belong to the Archangels.

Now we require yet another medium between the higher
missions of the Folk-spirits and those beings who here on the earth
are to be inspired by them. It will not be difficult for you to
perceive, at first in an abstract form, that the intermediary between
the two different kinds of Spirits is the Hierarchy of the Angels.
They are the connecting link between Folk-spirits and individual
human beings. In order that man may receive into himself that which
the Folk-spirit has to pour into the whole people, so that the
individual man may be an instrument in the mission of his people,
this inter-mediation between the individual human being and the
Archangel of his people is indispensable.

Thus we have looked up to beings who became men three
stages before the earth-man attained his human stage, and we have
seen how they place themselves consciously in mankind, and influence
our earth evolution. In the next lecture we shall have to show how
far the work of the Archangels, working down from above, from their
‘ I ’ which has already formed Manas or
Spirit-self and is now working on the etheric or life-body of man, is
expressed in the productions, the attributes and the character of a
people. Man is in the midst of this work of the higher beings, it
directly surrounds him, for as a member of a people he is placed in
it. It is true that man is in the first place a human individual, the
expression of an ego, but he also belongs to a certain people, i.e.,
something over which as a human individual he has at first no
control. How can a man, because he belongs to a certain people, help
speaking the language of that people? That is not an individual
acquirement, neither does it belong to what we call individual
progress, it is the stream into which he is received. Individual
human progress is a very different thing. While we see the Folk-souls
living and working, we must remember of what human progress consists,
and what a man requires in order to make his way through it. We shall
see what belongs not only to his evolution, so to speak, but to the
evolution of other quite different beings.

Thus we see how man is fitted into the ranks of the
Hierarchies, how in his evolution, from age to age, from epoch to
epoch, Beings whom we already know from another aspect work with him,
and we have seen how care is taken that these Beings may express
themselves in the most various individual ways, we have seen that
what they have to supply can enter into man.

The Zeitgeister, Time Spirits or Spirits of the Ages lay
down the great outlines for the several epochs. The extension of the
Spirit of the Age over the whole earth is made possible through the
various folk-individualities. Whilst the Spirits of the Age endow the
Folk-spirits, care is taken that these may flow into the individual
human beings; so that these individuals may fulfill their mission.
The fact that individual persons become instruments in this mission
of the Folk-spirits, is brought about by Beings who are between men
and the Folk-spirits, namely, by the Angels or Angeloi.

These lectures will give us an opportunity to study in
this wonderful web, the working of various folk-individualities of
the past and of the present. In the next lecture we shall begin to
throw light upon the way in which this web, which we have only
sketchily indicated to-day, is actually spun, that spiritual web
which is our everyday life in the world.